Why a booth counting tool, of all things
The first craft fair I helped work was a two day outdoor market where the vendor beside us sold hand cut lino prints. She was very good at printing and completely lost at counting. On Sunday afternoon she told me she thought the weekend had gone well, then admitted she had no idea whether it had beaten the show she did in April, because both weekends lived in the same paper notebook as a list of numbers with no dates. That evening I watched her load unsold work back into the same three bins she had brought, in the same unlabeled order, and I understood that the hard part of selling handmade work at a fair is not the selling. It is knowing, afterward, what actually happened.
I spent the next two seasons helping friends and neighbors run booths: pottery, leather, dyed silk, soap, tiny watercolors in cellophane sleeves. Every single one of them kept perfect records of the parts they enjoyed and no records at all of the parts they did not. Glaze recipes, thread counts and cut patterns were written down in beautiful detail. Booth fees, drive time, sold quantities and restock needs were held in memory until memory gave out. That is not carelessness. It is what happens when the only tools on offer are built for warehouses, point of sale terminals with monthly minimums, or a spreadsheet that nobody wants to open at 8 p.m. after loading a truck.
BoothInventory came out of that gap. I wanted something a person could hold in one hand while the other hand wraps a bowl in newsprint. Something that assumes the signal will drop, that two people will count the same table, that a customer will ask for a custom size right when you are mid tally. The core idea is boring on purpose: count what goes in, count what comes home, and let the difference tell the truth about the show. Everything else in the product, the restock lists, the scorecards, the break even math for a booth application, grows out of that one honest pair of numbers.
Experience and expertise
I have built software for small operators for more than a decade, mostly in trades where the person using the tool is also the person doing the work. That background matters here. A maker is not an operations department. They are a designer, a production line, a sales floor, a bookkeeper and a truck driver, usually within the same weekend. Every screen in BoothInventory is designed against that reality: large tap targets for cold fingers in October, no required fields that a person cannot answer while standing, and no report that takes longer to read than the drive home.
Before writing the first line of code I sat with fifteen vendors across nine different show formats: juried fine craft fairs, street festivals, indoor holiday markets, farmers market craft rows, artist alleys at conventions, and church hall bazaars. I asked each of them to reconstruct their last show from whatever records they had. Not one could do it completely. That exercise set the product's scope more than any feature request has since. I still run it once a season with new accounts, because the formats keep changing and the tool has to keep up.
How I work with makers
Support is not a queue I hand to somebody else. When you write to BoothInventory, the reply comes from me. I try to answer within one business day, and I do not send mail on Saturdays because that is when most of you are behind a table. Feature requests get read the same day they arrive and are logged with the name of the maker who asked, the show format they work, and the size of their studio, so that when I choose what to build next I can see who it serves rather than counting votes.
I also spend part of every season at shows. Not at a promotional stand: helping a vendor set up, counting with them, watching where the app gets in the way. Three of the most used features in the product came from those weekends, including offline counting and merged counts from two phones. Both were obvious once I stood in a barn with one bar of service and two people tallying the same shelf.
How this product is built and maintained
BoothInventory is published by MLJ, SASU, and I am the publication director, which means the words on this site and the behavior of the software are both my responsibility. Every number quoted on the home page comes from aggregated account data or from a maker survey, and I do not publish a figure I cannot trace back to a source. When a statistic changes, the page changes with it. If a claim on this site is ever wrong, writing to me is the fastest way to get it corrected, and I will say what changed rather than editing quietly.
On the product side, the standards are simple and public. Counts and sales work with no network connection, because a tool that fails in a field is not a tool. Your data is yours: full CSV export is available on every plan, at any time, without a support ticket. No advertising trackers run on this site, and maker data is never sold, rented or shared with show promoters or suppliers. Pricing is published in full on the home page, monthly, in US dollars, with no season contract and cancellation from inside the account screen. Changes that affect how you count are announced before they ship, never after.
What I am accountable for is narrow and clear: that the software counts correctly, that the reports match what happened at the table, that the site describes the product honestly, and that a maker who writes in gets a real answer from a real person. Everything else is negotiable. Those four are not.
Contact the author
The fastest route is email: jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Tell me what you make, what your show calendar looks like and where your counting falls apart, and I will answer with something specific rather than a brochure. If you would rather see the product working first, the demo request form takes about a minute, and the walkthrough uses your own product lines. You can also find me on X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, or read more of my work at jimenezjulien.com.